The dictionary in question is Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, published by G. & C. Merriam Company in 1924. It weighs just under fifteen pounds; the front cover is frayed and attached by only a few threads. I’ve since acquired older dictionaries, published early in the nineteenth century, in English and Spanish, and others of a more recent date, in French and German. Armenian, Japanese, and Russian […]
I gave up on Leopardi’s Zibaldone long ago. I’ve read thousands upon thousands of pages of other things since, so it was not because of its length, which I still regard as one of its saving graces. I stopped because I found it too generally negative in tone. My friend and fictional alter-ego, Stephen Monroe, was also negative, but his negativity was leavened with humor; also, he knew he was […]
I was back from a run in time to see a raccoon family scamper across the street and disappear in the dark between the neighbor’s house and ours. I think I counted two adults and three young ones. . A delightful footnote on the first page of Ozell’s revision of Peter Motteux’s translation of Don Quixote, where we learn, “His diet consisted more of Beef than Mutton; and with minc’d […]
For a good long stretch, I had been chipping away at Leopardi’s Zibaldone, a few lines here, a paragraph there, careful not to wrinkle the bible-thin pages. Since it is made to lie flat, I had been keeping the book open here on my mother’s desk. But the time came recently that I needed the space to accommodate more books: a complete six-volume set of Imaginary Conversations by Walter Savage […]
William Michaelian 